This. There was a similar article in the New York Times this week talking about how surprising it is that COD players are competing in million dollar tournament despite the fact that such large scale tournaments existed for games such as counter strike over a decade ago. Major starcraft tournaments have been occurring for even longer than that.
The largest Counter-Strike prizepool so far was ~$500,000. And, while Quake, Starcraft, WC3, and original Counter-Strike certainly had tournaments and a devoted following, the scene has exploded to a much larger audience and larger prizepools in the last few years, primarily on the back of streaming services like Twich and games such as Dota 2 and League of Legends.
